Dynamic Syntax: The Flow of Language Understanding - Tapa dura

"The framework of Dynamic Syntax is the most exciting new development in syntactic theory to emerge in recent years. As well as providing a full introduction to the framework, this book provides in-depth discussions of relative clause constructions, wh questions and crossover phenomena in a range of languages including English, Arabic and Japanese. This book is likely to become a classic and will be of interest to all those interested in the syntactic modelling of natural languages." Ronnie Cann, University of Edinburgh "This is an important book and ... the ideas presented in it deserve the close attention of syntacticians and semanticists." Linguist List

This ground-breaking volume sets out an original model of the dynamics of language processing, which can be used to explain the structural properties of language in a simple and elegant way. The model is introduced both informally and formally, and is applied to a range of languages.Alongside formal definitions, the authors use step-by-step derivations and detailed lexical definitions to illustrate this new form of syntactic analysis and to show how the model can be applied to a broad range of languages. In this way, the reader gets a sense of the rich potential the framework provides for general application to linguistic analysis.In bringing together explanations of knowledge of language, and the way language is used in parsing, the book challenges basic assumptions of linguistic theory, and is an essential read for anyone interested in what it means to know a language.